GeForce GTX 470 vs Radeon HD 5830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5830, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1120(224x5) SPUs as well as 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5830		175 Watts
GeForce GTX 470		215 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (23%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 470 should be just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 5830 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		133920 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5830		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5920 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5830 should be much (about 32%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 470. (explain)

Radeon HD 5830		44800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 470		33992 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10808 (32%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 470 should be much (about 90%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5830, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 470		24280 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5830		12800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11480 (90%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.